March Stories and Poems

International Women’s Day is taking place on Tuesday 8 March, this year with the theme #BreakTheBias. We’re marking this global day to celebrate women’s achievement and creativity by highlighting female authors from around the world in March’s Stories and Poems.

In this month’s prose pieces we’re taken on journeys far and wide, all the way from South London to the landscape of Cornwall, right over to the other side of the world to visit the coast of New Zealand. Changes are being forged for the people we meet, being brought about by many different factors – a return to a childhood home, the moving from one season to another, the first hopeful steps into a career that has long been dreamed of, meeting new people while being on holiday, and the desperation that comes with a difficult change in life’s circumstances. Through all of these varied situations there is hope to be found through making brave choices, sharing feelings ‘too big to keep inside’, helping to ease the loneliness of someone else and embracing experience, even when it comes with challenges and is perhaps not what we expected it to be.

March’s stories and extracts are:

Roimata (extract from Potiki) by Patricia Grace

Dust of Life (extract from The Salt Path) by Raynor Winn

Tulips (extract from The Deepening Stream) by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

The Boy Who Taught The Beekeeper To Read by Susan Hill

Shirley (extract from Girl, Woman, Other) by Bernardine Evaristo

The feeling of going on a journey, or several different ones, continue with March’s poems, which have all been read with a range of Shared Reading groups. There’s lots to be opened up and explored, including ways to begin again, celebration of the paths that have been traversed, the ways in which books can bring us different perspectives and how survival can be contained in a small but hardy flower springing from the ground.

‘Instructions on Not Giving Up’ by Ada Limón

‘Eve Remembering’ by Toni Morrison

‘The Fountain’ by Denise Levertov

‘There is no frigate like a book’ by Emily Dickinson

‘Snowdrops’ by Louise Glück

If you're a Reader Leader, head to the Online Community Hub to download this month's selection.